My dear Mr Dough,

It is my understanding that the aforementioned arras in question was, at the time, in the expert hands of Mr Tobias Withers-Pocklington, Bespoke Arras Handler to the Gentry and Distressed Gentlefolk.  I can only report that Madame Acarti appeared greatly changed after what is now known as The Great Arras Event. Alas she was never able to consume Gentlemans Relish with the same vigor again.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Respectfully yours
Morticia Addams-Cox-Pippin

I had the weirdest dream last night.  Nothing to do with music unfortunately. 

I was at a strange house and was on my way out to work in the morning.  There was a huge flatfish on their lawn, lying on its back gasping.  You know the sort, like a ray, that has the mouth underneath.  Nowhere near the sea.  I went to work and came back and it was still there, still alive and obviously suffering tremendously.  Instead of a fin it had a small white hand and it kept pointing to its mouth, gasping.  I went absolutely nuts at everyone around because it had been suffering all day and was just worrying how I was going to rescue it and get it to a sea, when suddenly I was standing in a strange  bedroom and they'd called my doctor (who was actually my doctor).  I was ranting and raving about these cruel people whilst he stood there silently and looking at me pityingly.  Then I woke up with a splitting headache, probably from the stress of it all. 

I wonder what the hell that meant!

Thanks m-j. The headache disappeared with my first mug of tea.  It wasn't a migraine thank goodness.  I'm still having the busy day!  Nothing worth watching on tv after 9 p.m. tonight so I'm upstairs ironing and listening to _{radio 4}


P.S.  I was hoping somebody might be able to give me a dream interpretation (that made sense if possible).     I have a "dream book" but it says that fish represent Christ and it would appear from that to have deep religious undertones.  Not being religious at all I don't think I buy that one. 

Stockhausen used to do that quite often, for example with his orchestral piece Trans written in 1971, which he said was as precise as possible a realisation of the dream (which he said he had on several consecutive nights) both visually and sonically. (It's one of his strongest works too, I think. The necessity to "stage" it means it hardly ever gets played though.) Mauricio Kagel said more or less the same thing about his 1966 piece Match, in which two cellists have a kind of surrealistic virtuosity competition, umpired by a percussionist (he also made a film of it, of which you can see a very bad reproduction here).

Stravinsky's Octet for wind instruments - a work in which he changed direction completely - sprang directly from a dream he'd had the previous night of "...a group of instrumentalists, playing attractive music...", and although it seems that what he heard doesn't appear as such in the piece, it does have some moments (particularly the end of the final movement for which 'attractive' is exactly the right word) which are worlds away from what he had been writing recently.

I imagine somebody sufficiently (a) imaginative and (b) skilled could reconstruct an entire lost scene from that fragment!

err, tinners, quotes in a twist again, then?

It's a documented fact that Olivier was able to extemporise iambic pentameters on the hoof on those occasions when he'd forgotten what Shakespeare had actually written, and it's my experience that he was far from alone in that respect: I've been on stage when others have done the same, squirming in sympathy at their plight, reading that look in their eyes.... It's one of the most nerve-wracking experiences you can ever have as an actor, and the weird thing is that you know in advance that there's a gap in your memory coming up before it arrives, as if the brain is scanning ahead of the performance.

I still have variations of the standard actors' dream of finding myself in the middle of a production which I haven't rehearsed, or worse still, discovering that there's choreography I've not been taught...

I wonder if he ever dreamt his lines,
And hastened in the morn to write them down.
It isn't hard to write this kind of verse;
One doesn't even have to make it rhyme -
It's quite a cop-out when you come to think.

I expect Olivier's lines were considerably more Shakespearian than that, and Shakespeare's certainly were .